Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy

An article in Foreign Policy in Focus by Ann Jordan that reviews Siddharth Kara's book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2008). 

She argues that, 'the economic model he erects is built on several unexamined assumptions and unattributed statements of fact and data. The most seriously flawed assumption he makes is to equate human beings — trafficked persons and sex workers — with commodities. His economic model treats women as passive objects that are pushed and pulled by exploiters using forced labour to lower costs to meet demand, and ignores the poverty, discrimination, and violence that compel women to make risky decisions. Adults who make rational choices from among limited options are actors who don't fit a neat supply/demand economic model, and so they are factored out of the equation in order to situate trafficking as a commodity business.'